Gerhard Wegner (Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, Mainz) Professor Emeritus of the Chemistry Department of the University of Patras is giving a lecture on “Supramolecular Architectures and Molecular Machines: Self-Assembly vs Constructs” on Tuesday, May 12, 2015, at 10:00 in the seminar room of the Chemistry Department of the University of Patras.

Abstract

What is Supramolecular Chemistry good for? Does it provide the toolbox to develop and design molecular machines? What defines a molecular machine and to what extent serves biology or more precisely molecular cell biology as plentiful source of information how molecular machines should be designed and how they perform? While self-organization of molecular entities has received much interest among academics, the processes to achieve defined molecular constructs are more promising. Examples will be shown and discussed. The ultimate goal – as is intimately connected to the design of machines – is to achieve directed motion of molecular defined entities over distances on the micrometer scale or larger in nonbiogenic environment. Unless this can be achieved, molecular machines will remain a utopic desire. The whole discussion is also basic to the concepts put forward by the emerging field of Synthetic Biology.